Philomena Lynott

Moss Side

Philomena Lynott came from Dublin to Manchester around 1947 to find work. She was young, unmarried, and Catholic. In Birmingham she met Cecil Parris, from Georgetown, British Guiana, and their son Philip was born on 20 August 1949 at Hallam Hospital in West Bromwich. Parris was transferred to London and the relationship didn't last. Philomena brought Phil back to Manchester and settled in Moss Side.

Phil spent his early childhood there. Moss Side in the early 1950s was, by Philomena's own account, beautiful: leafy avenues, Alexandra Road, the park. But Philomena described her own experience as one of racism, loneliness and poverty, and around 1957 she made the hardest decision of her life and sent Phil to live with her parents, Frank and Sarah Lynott, in Crumlin, Dublin. His grandfather Frank became the father Phil had never had. Philomena stayed in Manchester.

Crumlin to Jailbreak

Dublin in the late 1950s was not an obvious place for a mixed-race boy from Manchester to thrive, but Phil Lynott was not an obvious person. He was Black and Irish in a country with almost no Black population, and he made it work through force of personality, humour, and the discovery that if you got up and sang, people listened to you regardless of what you looked like. His first band was the Black Eagles, where drummer Brian Downey joined him in 1965. He played in Skid Row, where Downey turned down a place and the drum seat went to Noel Bridgeman. Downey went to Sugar Shack, and the two of them reunited in Orphanage.

In December 1969, Lynott and Downey joined forces with guitarist Eric Bell and keyboard player Eric Wrixon, both from the Belfast band Them, which had launched Van Morrison. Wrixon left before the first single was released. They called themselves Thin Lizzy, after Tin Lizzie, the robot from the Dandy. In November 1972, they released their version of "Whiskey in the Jar", a traditional Irish song reworked so completely that it became something new. It went to number one in Ireland and reached number 6 in the UK in early 1973.

Bell left in 1973, and Lynott recruited two guitarists: Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson. The twin-guitar harmony style Robertson and Gorham developed, two leads playing interlocking melodic lines, would become one of the most influential sounds in rock. Jailbreak, released in 1976, reached number 10 in the UK and number 18 in the US. Its lead single, "The Boys Are Back in Town", reached number 8 in the UK and number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. One theory has always been that the song is about Manchester's Quality Street Gang, whose members were reportedly regulars at Philomena's hotel. "Johnny the Fox Meets Jimmy the Weed", on the album that followed, name-checks gang member Jimmy Donnelly. Lynott had a gift for writing about ordinary loyalty as though it were mythology, and ordinary nights out as though they were epic.

The Clifton Grange

While Phil was becoming one of the biggest rock stars in Europe, his mother was running a hotel in Whalley Range. From around 1966, Philomena and her partner Dennis Keeley took on the Clifton Grange Hotel on the corner of Wellington Road and Alness Road, buying it after six months. It became known as the Showbiz Hotel because Philomena filled it with performers, musicians, magicians, ventriloquists, and anyone else who needed a bed and could tell a story. The hotel licence meant the bar could still be open at 2am when other local venues had shut. George Best reportedly drank there. Alex Higgins reportedly drank there. Coronation Street actors reportedly drank there. When Thin Lizzy played Manchester, the band stayed at the Clifton Grange. The boys were back in town, and town was Whalley Range.

In December 1976, the Sex Pistols' Anarchy Tour hit Manchester. Hotels across the city refused to take them. Philomena didn't. She was the only hotelier willing to put them up, and the Pistols slept at the Clifton Grange while respectable Manchester slammed its doors. Phil had already written a song about the place: "Clifton Grange Hotel" appears on Thin Lizzy's 1971 debut album, before the band had even had a hit. He wrote about the hotel before "Whiskey in the Jar", before "The Boys Are Back in Town", before any of it. The Clifton Grange came first.

The Manchester thread ran deeper than the hotel. Darren Wharton, the keyboard player who joined Thin Lizzy in 1980 aged eighteen and played on the Chinatown album, was born in Failsworth and was recommended to Lynott by a friend in Manchester. Manchester kept feeding the band, even when the band belonged to Dublin.

The Rocker

Phil Lynott was the first Black Irish rock star, though he would have been uncomfortable with a phrase that reduced him to a category. He was a poet who published two books, Songs for While I'm Away in 1974 and Philip in 1977. He used the word Black in song titles when this was still unusual for rock. He drew on Celtic mythology and American Westerns and his own experience of being the only person in the room who looked like him, and he turned all of it into songs that sounded like stories you already knew.

Live and Dangerous, released in June 1978, peaked at number 2 in the UK, held off the top by Saturday Night Fever. It sold over half a million copies and is widely regarded as one of the greatest live albums ever made, though how much of it is genuinely live has long been disputed: producer Tony Visconti claimed the album was seventy-five per cent studio, while the band's manager insisted the opposite. Black Rose: A Rock Legend, with Gary Moore back on guitar, reached number 2 in 1979. Thunder and Lightning, the final studio album, reached number 4 in 1983. Their final performance was on 4 September 1983, on the Monsters of Rock tour in Germany.

Philomena

Phil Lynott collapsed at his home in Kew on Christmas Day 1985. He was taken to Salisbury Infirmary and died on 4 January 1986, aged thirty-six. The cause was septicaemia brought on by long-term heroin use. He is buried at St Fintan's Cemetery in Sutton, on the north side of Dublin Bay.

Philomena ran the Clifton Grange until around 1980, when she moved to Sutton, on Howth Head, into a house Phil had bought for her. She wrote My Boy, a memoir about her son that became a bestseller in Ireland. She campaigned for years with the Róisín Dubh Trust to have Phil honoured with a statue in Dublin, and on 19 August 2005 she unveiled it herself: a life-size bronze by the sculptor Paul Daly on Harry Street, just off Grafton Street, outside Bruxelles Bar, the pub where Phil used to drink. It would have been his fifty-sixth birthday the following day. She campaigned against drug abuse and for LGBT rights. She died on 12 June 2019, aged eighty-eight, after a battle with cancer. The Irish President Michael D. Higgins led the tributes, crediting her work to keep Phil's legacy alive. She is buried in the same cemetery as Phil at St Fintan's.

The Clifton Grange Hotel closed, but the building on the corner of Wellington Road and Alness Road was still standing as private housing as recently as 2014. Phil Lynott was made in Dublin and belongs to Dublin. But his mother lived in Manchester for around thirty years, ran the Biz for fourteen of them, housed the Sex Pistols when nobody else would. Her boy started school in Moss Side before becoming the first Black Irishman to fill arenas across Europe. This is her page.